Lily and the Subheroes
by ExtraSyrupPlease
Summary: Lily Evans and Harry Potter are members of a group of so-called superheroes who each have one special, useless power. Or so it seems at first. Nothing in this story makes much sense or has much relation to canon, which is intentional because I thought it would be funny. It might be a parody of other bad fanfiction.
1. In which the main cast is introduced

There were seven of us. Well, to be honest, no one was really quite sure how many of us there were, as the exact number varied as convenient to the plot; but seven is an important number, so there must have been seven.

We were all comic-book style superheroes – that is, we each had one special power, and only one. However, we weren't very heroic (thus making our heroism an informed attribute) because our powers were all utterly useless.

I, Lily Evans, had the power to make myself feel like an idiot, and I couldn't control it very well so I felt like an idiot most of the time. It didn't help matters that I also happened to be an actual idiot. Hewlett Packard was an alarm clock that had the power to turn into a printer. Neither device was particularly useful in our current situation, but to add insult to injury, both of his forms were dysfunctional. Megalapteryx had the power to catch fire when angry. Beanbag was supposed to be able to teleport from one place to another, but instead he could only get stuck in hyperspace; this would be fatal, so he had of course never actually used his power, but thanks to superpowerful genetics he could be sure he'd inherited it from one of his two fathers (who were each married to each other and to two of his four mothers, and his mothers were all married to each other as well). Harry Potter, my alleged son, had the power to invent genetic theories that sounded nice but didn't hold any water. Sally Jones was constantly subjected to mental static that was apparently a dysfunctional version of telepathy (she was the result of badly done genetic engineering experiments). My alter ego Spike Sanders, who sometimes manifested as a physically separate entity, had the power to change whether or not he existed, and he tended to lose control of it when under the influence of strong emotions; that is, he would cease to exist, and that made him even angrier. Mouse, a cat, had the power to materialise pink flying mice that immediately turned into iridescent bubbles and started chowing down on everyone's hair. Did that add up to seven? I lost count, see.

Spike is looking over my shoulder. "That was eight, not seven," he says. "You must have forgotten about me."  
"No, I just lost count. I'm an idiot, remember?"  
"Oh, yeah. So why don't you use the power of plot to cut it down to seven?"  
"I don't have the power of plot. I have the power of idiocy."  
"But you made all this up!"  
"I did not. Or if I did, I must have forgot about it. Now can we get on with things? This wasn't supposed to be in medias res."  
"Boring." Spike goes back to making pencils have pretend sex with each other.

Now, as I was saying, there also wasn't much for us to do in the way of superheroing, which was, of course, fortunate. Every so often a more or less stereotypical villain came along and we pretended to thwart their evil plans, but mostly we just floated in a colourless void. Some said that the colourless void was due to our being part of a work of fiction created by someone who couldn't care less about the scenery and plot, or lacked an imagination – or worse: both – but I always dismissed those rumours as silly conspiracy theories.


	2. In which the fourth wall vanishes

One fine day, the sun was shining to highlight the fact that we were in a good mood. At least, that's what I thought it was doing, but Harry didn't agree.  
"This is an example of the pathetic fallacy," said Harry. "The pathetic fallacy is when the environment is believed to reflect the characters' moods or is –"  
"Yes, dear, I know all about that," Spike broke in. "What you didn't realise is that this proves beyond a doubt that we are in a work of fiction designed in such a way that you can tell us all about what's really going on to prove how much smarter you are. Well, guess what, I can out-jargon you if I try hard enough."  
"For the six hundred and sixty-sixth time, this is reality," I said. "Where do you guys get the idea that this is fiction?"  
"If this isn't fiction, why am I an example of Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke?" asked Sally.  
Our conversation was soon forgotten, however, as we found ourselves in a vague, nondescript room that had four walls on either side, but somehow no floor or ceiling. Just looking at it made me feel stupid. The walls were numbered (in order) 0, 3, 4 and 11. The sun was no longer shining. No one was quite sure what to make of this, but then we were never quite sure what to make of our surroundings because they were completely random.

The wall labelled "4" suddenly vanished in a stylised way that was reminiscent of the fadeouts often used in video clips. Behind it was a vague, nondescript stretch of empty space, as well as a floor with pink bunny shapes printed all over it. In the middle of the floor stood a young woman who looked like she'd had way too much plastic surgery, or like she was actually made of plastic. She was some kind of anthropomorphic personification of Western feminine beauty ideals taken up to eleven. She had long purple hair that ended in black snake heads where it reached her feet. Her eyes seemed to be multiple colours at once. She was wearing a sparkly dress that was the same "colour" as her eyes and was, shall we say, not very modest.

Next to her stood Draco Malfoy. He was wearing leather pants and a shirt made of Scotch tape.

"Hello, everyone," said the young woman in a whiny, sing-song voice. "I have many names, and to list them all would take too much of my precious time. You may call me Mary-Sue. Please don't comment on my appearance; I'm so beautiful it's a curse."  
"Just cut your hair," said Megalapteryx, whom we called Meg for short. "It did wonders for me – otherwise everyone would assume I had an astonishingly appropriate appearance." Meg had red hair that she kept in a pixie cut.  
"Cut my hair?!" exclaimed Mary-Sue. "But then no one would know I'm a Slytherin. I can't do that."  
"In case you haven't noticed," said Harry, "we're not actually in Hogwarts, and Hogwarts may not even exist, so the point about Slytherin is moot. This is obvious because, in canon, Lily and I were never in Hogwarts at the same time."  
"We weren't?" I was confused.  
"Of course not – you were dead by the time I was enrolled."  
"I was dead? Oh, dear. Does that mean I'm supposed to be dead right now? What do I do?"  
Spike decided to butt in. "Bah! Harry's just found an excuse to get on his high horse again. Ignore him, Lily."  
"How come I never get to say anything?" asked Beanbag.  
"I was wondering the same thing," said Draco. "Am I supposed to stand here in this ridiculous getup until the cows come home? That would be terribly unbecoming of a Malfoy."  
"Ah, we've just encountered a trope called 'Talking Is a Free Action'," said Mary-Sue. "At least, I think we have; I haven't been paying attention myself. Anyhow, that means that, when characters are talking, all other action is suspended so they can talk in peace. In this case it was due to the author's poor writing skills and lack of imagination."  
"I thought _I_ was Mr. Exposition," said Harry.  
"You are." Mary-Sue smiled a sickeningly sweet smile. "I can be Mrs. Exposition. Would you like to marry me?"  
Draco was incredulous. "But you're already in a relationship with _me_! Does this mean you're going to have a love triangle with me and Potter? I hate him."  
"This turn of non-events is surpassingly stupid," said Meg. "It's making me angry, and that could kill me. Don't you lot have any respect?"  
"My head hurts," said Sally. "This Mary-Sue person did something to make the static worse. Where's my tin foil hat?"  
"I think it's in hyperspace somewhere," said Beanbag.  
"You know how everyone has one special power?" said Mary-Sue. "Well, I have the power to emit stupid rays, thus turning everyone within sixty feet into a blithering idiot. This is normally extremely effective for convincing people that I'm wonderful and intelligent, since I have an IQ of about 60, but it seems to be malfunctioning today. I'll have to cook up an evil plan to make you all stupid. Maybe I can get my daddy Satan to help."  
"Um, guys? Am I the only one who's noticed that we're floating in space?" Spike wondered.  
"I never notice anything," I said. "Besides, we're almost always floating in space."  
"Beep, beep, beep!" said Hewlett. According to him, it was exactly 88:88 AM.  
Mouse let out a mighty yowl, and a cloud of mice surged forth out of nowhere, turned into iridescent bubbles, made a hideous squeaking, and began to munch on Mary-Sue's hair. "Ow!" she yelled. "That hurts! I was all set to explain to you about how I broke the fourth wall because I'm an author avatar, but then you inflicted these horrid things on me! Also, I broke a nail and my shoes fell off!"  
"That's impossible," said Harry. "There's no gravity, so your shoes can't fall off."  
"But they did! They were such beautiful, expensive shoes. They were my favourites out of my 666 pairs of shoes, and I didn't even get them from Walmart! How dare you do such things to me? Now I'll be ugly for the rest of my life! Waaaaah!"  
Then Draco cast Avada Kedavra on Mary-Sue, but she dodged it and it hit me instead.  
"See, that's what happened to you in canon," said Harry. "Wait, you're still alive?"  
"That's weird," I said. "How the heck am I still alive? I thought that was supposed to kill people?"  
"You're so stupid that it didn't work on you," said Draco.  
"Are you sure?" said Harry. "I think the problem is that she's protected by plot armor."  
"What's plot armor?"  
"It's when you can't be killed off because you're vital to the plot. It's not normally this stupid, though."  
"See, I told you she was too stupid to kill," said Draco.


	3. In which nobody cares about the unicorns

siriusblackrose: Mary-Sue is intended as a parody or deconstruction (or something) of Mary Sues, if that helps. I'm afraid she does play a moderately significant role, though (I wrote the entire story offline – not sure if that's ok or what). There may be "straight" Mary Sue characters but those are unintentional.

* * *

Then, for some reason, we were in the Forbidden Forest. Somewhere in the distance a unicorn was drinking Professor Quirrell's blood, but nobody seemed to care. Sally put her hands over her ears and shouted something too obscene to repeat here.

"What –" I began.  
"Who the hell just fixed my telepathy? It was fine before – now I'm subjected to your bloody stupid thoughts in every last detail! Why in the name of moronium are you all thinking about women in bikinis?! Even the girls! Sheesh."  
"I admit it's a chronic problem for me," said Spike, "but you didn't need to tell everyone about it."  
"Well, I _am_ a lesbian," said Meg. "You got a problem with that?"  
"Calm down, everyone," said Harry. "We can handle this rationally. For starters, this type of telepathy doesn't exist in this universe: the version we use is voluntary and only works when you're –"  
"– looking someone in the eyes," Sally finished. "That's fine and dandy, but telling me I can't do what I'm doing doesn't help me in the slightest. You never thought of that, naturally, because you're distracted by the imaginary women in bikinis. What am I supposed to do now that the plot has gone off the rails and isn't tailored to showcase your rationalist theories? Oh, and your Occlumency thingie doesn't keep me out. At all."  
"Weren't we supposed to find out what's killing the unicorns?" I asked. No one listened to me.  
"At least you don't have a useless power any more," said Beanbag. "Like the rest of us."  
"You have got to be kidding me – how on earth is it useful to know about everyone's rubbish sexual fantasies? It's not, that's how. Also, how come the women are always the ones who get stuck with useless psychic stuff, while the men get all the cool, useful powers? Well, you folks aren't all that useful, but you know, in properly done superhero works. I guess it's because I'm supposed to be more in tune with others' emotions. Well, I say your emotions can all go to hell!"  
There was a brief period of silence, during which we all stared at each other and the trees turned into chainsaws.  
"We seem to be suffering from canon defilement," said Mary-Sue, who had somehow grown a new pair of shoes; the new shoes had pink snakes all over them. "Canon defilement is when canonical events, rules and characters are, you know, defiled. I take great joy in defiling canon, but it seems you lot are trying to usurp my role. I shall have to do something about this. Perhaps I'll just kill all of you... but that would be too stereotypical, and I'd show myself to be flawed, which would be unacceptable. Whatever shall I do?"  
"How'd you get those shoes?" Harry asked. "You can't just materialise stuff out of nowhere. That violates the Law of Conservation of Mass."  
"I can do anything I want because I'm awesome and you're not," she snapped.  
"Besides, the universe doesn't work according to the laws of anything in particular," I said. "We figured that out ages ago, remember?"  
"Mrrowr?" said Mouse.  
Hewlett turned into a printer and started printing off sheets that materialised out of nowhere, making horrible noises as he crumpled them up.

In the middle of this unproductive exchange, a further distraction appeared. A woman's voice shouted: "Chainsaws?! Not chainsaws again! If they send me to one more stupid chainsaw forest, just _one more_ , I'm going to bring back one of these and they can talk to _that_."  
"That's weird," said Sally. "Where is she? I don't sense –"  
The owner of the voice stepped out from behind a tree. "Yeah, no kidding. That's what this here tin foil hat is for." She tapped her head, which was indeed covered in tin foil; pale hair peeked out around the edges. "Sure they call it some kind of technobabble thingamajig, but at the end of the day it's just a tin foil hat. By the way, Miss Jones, you're under arrest."  
"Huh? I am?"  
"Unauthorised use of pseudoscientific abilities. I overheard the conversation."  
Harry broke in. "You were here this whole time and you only just now noticed the chainsaw trees?"  
"They only just now turned into chainsaws. When I got here they were trees. It's a shapeshifting forest. Those are so last year, you know?"  
"Also, since when are 'pseudoscientific abilities' a crime, and how do you know Sally wasn't making it up? It's well known that only one kind of telepathy exists in this universe and it isn't the kind she claims to have."  
The strange woman facepalmed. "This universe? I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't want to know, but you're right – I'm an idiot. As usual." I was surprised; I thought I was the only idiot around here. She took off her hat, revealing shoulder-length sandy hair that looked like it had just come out of a hat.  
When she spoke again, her tone was exasperated. "Yes, she's telling the truth. Nice to know my hair's a mess; I figured it would be. Also nice to know I look good in this outfit. Why do they make me wear this stupid skin-tight getup and then expect me to go out in public with my head uncovered? No respect for us women, I tell you. Well, I'm going to play annoying music in my head for the rest of today, and _you_ get to listen to it, Sally."  
Sally looked incredulous. "So you're... but I thought I was unique. We're all unique. Isn't that right, Lily?"  
Now it was my turn to look incredulous. "You're asking _me_? I don't know anything and I have no idea what's going on half the time, never mind right now. Reality in these parts is almost always out to lunch, so I gave up trying to think logically about five jillion years ago."  
"What in the name of cat barf is _that_ supposed to be?" demanded the tin foil hat woman, pointing at Hewlett who began to beep furiously and spit paper everywhere. "No, don't tell me, I know now. Good grief, how unscientific. Hewlett, dear, don't you know you're illegal? Yes, shapeshifting violates the law of conversation of mass, and artificial intelligence hasn't been invented yet so no mechanisms for it are present. Even if it's, shall we say, artificial stupidity rather than intelligence."  
"Hey, wait a minute," Harry broke in again. "Are you saying the laws of physics have to be enforced by someone or else they don't apply? That's nuts. I mean, magic is weird to begin with, but if some law doesn't apply in a given situation, then it just doesn't apply. Right?"  
For the first time I noticed the logo, or whatever it was, on Tin Foil Woman's outfit. (It was a dress, actually, with a skirt that came to her knees.) It was a toilet roll inside a not sign. What the heck? What did she have against toilet paper?

She made some kind of disgusted noise. "I dunno. I haven't slept since, like... what year is this again?"  
"2015," I said.  
"2015?!" Harry repeated. "I thought it was 1992."  
"The Roman Empire never ended," said Spike, "so it must be either 138 or 115, depending on which of you is correct."  
"You're all wrong," said Beanbag. "It's obviously twenty minutes into the future."  
"That's a relative time, not an absolute time," said Meg. "'The future' isn't a year, in case you hadn't noticed. You need to decide which future before you start talking about –"  
"Okay, that's enough." Tin Foil Woman sounded coldly authoritative again. "I give up. This entire region of reality is under arrest, I reckon. You guys haven't got a clue what's going on because this place is so bloody confusing that it must have been designed by magic mushrooms that were high on stupid pills. I think they get a kick out of sending me to places like this, but I don't know what they're thinking because of all their fancy technology stuff and whatnot. It's not fair, you know?"  
The trees were rainbow lasers instead of chainsaws. The wind blew through the trees, but the noise it made sounded like music; an ominously alien kind of music, but music nonetheless.

Meg was glaring at Tin Foil Woman. "Let me get this straight. Have you been –"  
She cut her off. "Yes, I have, and I've been reading everyone else's minds too so don't get the idea that you're special. Save your breath, Big Bird: I already know you think it's unethical because you're still closeted and all that jazz, but you know what? I don't have a choice. It's my job to scan for subversive thoughts, and if I pick up other stuff along the way, too bad. It was either this or be locked up. So I'm making you angry – do I look like I give a flying frog? Go ahead and set yourself on fire, see if I care. I've seen worse. Do you know what they do to us? It's unspeakably awful."  
A heavy silence settled over our region of the forest, broken only by the wind-music and the faint buzzing of the "trees". They looked kind of like lightsabers with branches. It didn't have any mass or weight, of course, being merely the absence of sound, but it stood in stark contrast to the lively dialogue that had until now animated the party. Meg looked really upset.

At length, Spike broke the silence. "Whoa, what? _That's_ your job? Babylon 5 called, and they... yeah. You know."  
"I'm not from Babylon 5. I'm real, and I don't just mean 'real', I mean _real_ with a capital S. That is to say, I don't know either. They keep flip-flopping about what we're supposed to do, and I swear, sometimes they just want us to go around being evil and creepy for no reason. What was I doing again? Oh yeah, I think the noodles are about to boil over and we need to put old moldy t-shirts in the salad, but we have to chop them up first and –" she interrupted herself as Mary-Sue and Draco reappeared from the Porta-Potty that had somehow materialised in front of a tree. "Snakes? Snake hair? How can this be?! You're an abomination! a crime against nature!" She devolved into incoherent yelling and ran off into the great wide nowhere.


	4. In which Quirrell is eaten by a unicorn

"What a prick," said Meg.  
"Good riddance, indeed," said Mary-Sue. "She was stealing the spotlight from its rightful owner, i.e. yours truly. Now can we get back to talking about how wonderful I am?" She smiled a sickeningly sweet smile at Draco. "I'm just simply marvellous, aren't I, Draco honey?"  
"No way," said Draco. "Everyone hates you."  
"But that's impossible. I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread, so you must only think that because you're evil."  
"What? I can't be evil. I've got leather pants on. Everyone knows I'm a good guy when I'm wearing leather pants."  
"And everyone eats eggs!" I exclaimed. No one got the reference.  
Sally, who had been standing there in silence looking utterly horrified, suddenly brightened as she noticed something on the ground. "Look, she forgot her hat." She put it on. "Ah, much better," she said, looking relieved.  
"Are you sure you wanted to do that?" Harry asked. "You could catch lice that way. Who knows what's on her head. Maybe something even worse than lice, like astral lice."  
"Or _cooties_ ," Beanbag added. "Cooties are the worst. All girls have them."  
"That's sexist," said Meg.  
"Actually, no – most girls have regular cooties, but some of them have lesbian cooties. Like you for example."  
" _Beanbag!_ "  
"Cool it, you guys," said Sally. "I'd know if there were cooties on this thing, or lice or whatever. Besides, I don't think I could have stood another minute of that racket. I'd rather have lice than go crazy. Say, did I mention Professor Quirrell just got killed by a unicorn?"  
"See, I told you we needed to investigate the unicorns," I said, "but nobody listened to me. Nobody ever listens."  
"That's because you're an idiot," said Draco. "Wait, what? Quirrell's dead? But he was _cool_!"  
"No, he was one of the bad guys," said Harry. "He was killing unicorns and turned out to be Voldemort."  
"Who cares? Those stupid unicorns are just an excuse to send us out here in this scary place with laser trees. Since when are there laser trees here, anyway?"  
"Since about half an hour ago, give or take a few nanometres," said Spike. "Speaking of which, when's dinner? More to the point, _what's_ dinner? I'm in the mood for an ice cream pizza."  
Sally rolled her eyes. "You know, I think I'll go crazy even _without_ hearing your thoughts. Let's get our act together and do something about that unicorn before it eats us."  
"Unicorns don't eat people," said Harry. "Are you sure you didn't imagine it? You've been saying an awful lot of implausible stuff lately."  
"That's nice. The unicorn and Quirrell are right over there." She pointed to a clearing about forty feet in front of us, slightly to the right. Some of the trees seemed to be engaging in lightsaber duels, except no one was holding them. The sky was an impossibly bright green and all the clouds were shaped like snake bunnies.

We all walked over to the clearing, including Mary-Sue who brought up the rear with a sour look, her hair-snakes making disgruntled noises. Her eyes seemed to change colour depending on her mood; now they vacillated between red and black, sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes in-between, sometimes forming a tiny pattern of alternating squares. Her nose looked like it might be about to fall off.

The unicorn was no longer drinking Quirrell's blood and was now munching on him, looking quite pleased with itself.

"Are you sure he's dead?" Mary-Sue asked. "I might be able to find some way to bring him back to life. Then I can take credit for anything he does after that."  
"No, that's my job," said Harry. "I'm the one who always finds some way to do the impossible."  
"No, _I'm_ the one who does impossible stuff. Well, actually I just use mind control devices to make people think I do impossible stuff, but the point still stands."  
"As far as I'm concerned," said Spike, "the only point right now is to get dinner – no, wait, that's gross." He indicated the gory scene in front of us. "I'm not hungry any more. Screw you guys."  
"I'm pretty sure I'd know whether he's dead or not," said Sally. "I felt a disturbance in the Force earlier."  
"I thought this was Babylon 5 – now you're telling me it's Star Wars? I guess that makes sense with the lightsabers and all, but I'm getting the sense that this universe can't make up its mind about what it is."  
"Those are both science fiction," said Harry, "and this is obviously fantasy. I mean, come on, there are unicorns and magic. What more do you need?"  
"It was a figure of speech," said Sally, sounding annoyed. "You know what, this is boring. Can we go play World of Pillowcraft?"  
"That's a stupid sissy game," said Beanbag. "It's all about making pillows."  
"And pillow fights."  
"Pillow fights are for wimps. Real men use rocket-powered pillows made of explodium."  
"I can do better than that. My version has pillows that can blow up entire planets and do FTL travel. Pillow fights _in space_!"

Mary-Sue's eyes were sort of blue; one was greenish while the other was purplish. Her eyelashes, I realised, had been purple all along. She was wearing holographic fishnets.

"Real women get into real fights," said Meg, crossing her arms and looking tough.  
"This is stupid," said Spike, who promptly vanished into thin air in disgust.  
"I think he was going to say something about true Scotsmen," I said, "but darned if I know what. How many true Scotsmen does it take to change a real lightbulb?"  
"Hey, I'm the one who lectures people about logical fallacies," said Harry. "Meg, Beanbag, you're guilty of using the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy, which means you've defined 'real women' and 'real men' in an arbitrary manner so as to claim that those groups have whatever characteristics you want them to have."  
Meg shrugged.  
"Real men don't need logic," said Beanbag. "Everyone knows physical force works better."

The trees turned back into something resembling actual trees, but they were extensively draped with toilet paper. Mary-Sue cackled evilly.  
"What's so funny?" I asked.  
She just laughed harder.

Someone behind us announced: "Hi, guys! I'm back!" The voice was unmistakably Tin Foil Woman, but she sounded a lot more energetic.  
"Sheesh, you again? Get lost." Meg wasn't happy with this development.  
"Sorry, I can't take the 'get lost' action more than once per long rest. Talking may be a free action for you folks, but it wasn't enough time for me to take a nap. I did eat an ice cream sandwich and take some Ritalin, though. Too bad it sharpens all six of my senses. Jones, you jerk, you stole my hat."  
She looked more energetic, too. If there'd been walls she'd have been bouncing off them.  
Meg rolled her eyes.  
"You should have taken it with you if you wanted to keep it," said Sally.  
"Humans only have five senses," said Harry. "Some say we have more, e.g. sense of temperature and the myriad other uses for external nerve endings, but it's more logical to file all those under 'sense of touch', and other alleged senses, such as time, aren't actually things we can sense and were just shoehorned in. However, I have reason to believe you don't mean any of those things, and thus you're probably delusional."  
"Well, that's harsh," said Sally. "Maybe you should get your head out of the sand and stop being such an Agent Scully."  
"That's just what they want you to believe, Parry," said Tin Foil Woman. "Hotter, rather. Some of us do have more than five, and you correctly guessed what I meant, natch, but they're keeping us a secret and I'm not allowed to tell you about it."  
"Who's 'they'?" Harry asked.  
"They're them. The conspiracy. You've all heard of the conspiracy, but no one can agree on what it is because we're not allowed to tell you the details. Now then, speaking of them, I heard some of you wondering if the unicorn was going to eat you, but don't you worry about that because they told us to send her here to take out Quirrell because he was a whistleblower. That is, he was trying to indoctrinate you with pseudoscience, and that's a terrible thing to do, innit? Ooh, look, a butterfly!" There was indeed a butterfly, and it was purple with shiny green spots. She rushed off after it, leading her up one of the toilet papered trees.  
"I thought Ritalin was supposed to _help_ with ADHD," said Meg, "not make it worse."  
"So is toilet paper illegal or what?" I wondered. "I mean, what's with the toilet roll in the not sign? Is she going to arrest those trees because there's TP all over them?"  
"I'm right here, you know. Just because I'm up a tree doesn't mean I can't hear you. It's a figurative toilet roll. Say, I might need some help getting down from here."  
I wasn't any less confused. "What's a figurative toilet roll, and why is it bad?"  
"Let's get out of here," said Draco. "The unicorns seem to be doing just fine, and I don't know about the rest of you but I'm not helping a stupid Muggle get down from a stupid tree."  
"I'm not a Muggle, I'm a telepath. I'm also a cat." She started making horrible meowing noises, which made us all decide we'd better go someplace else.


	5. In which a cow is disguised as a tree

"I wonder who the next Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher is going to be," said Harry as we walked back through the forest. "I bet the crazy toilet roll lady would have flipped her lid if I said her alleged conspiracy thingy was fulfilling the curse on that position."  
Mary-Sue cackled again. Her left eye was bright yellow and her right eye was purple.  
"She probably already knows you thought of that," said Sally.  
"Real men don't need to be taught how to defend themselves," said Beanbag. "Real men use pyrokinesis to make rocket-powered pillows and blow up the Death Star."  
"Pyrokinesis has nothing to do with rockets, you idiot," said Meg. "It's about setting stuff on fire with your mind."  
"Then why does the word literally mean moving things with fire?"  
"Whatever."  
"Wait, so what's this Defence Against the Dark Arts thing, anyway? Do we get to blow stuff up?"  
"Stop it, Beanbag," said Spike, who had reappeared. "I'm the one who blows stuff up. You wouldn't have the nerve."  
The toilet paper slowly faded away, revealing the trees to be clawing menacingly at the air. Perhaps they were epileptic trees. They were also glowing faintly, which was apparent now that the sky had darkened to a shade of red reminiscent of dried blood.  
"No, we won't be blowing stuff up," said Harry reproachfully. "It's a class in how to defend yourself against dark magic, basically. You'll find out when you get there."  
One of the trees leaned in front of us, blocking our way. However, it leaned over so far that the top of it fell off and revealed... a cow?  
"We should have gotten out of here back when the trees turned into chainsaws," said Draco, looking as if the events had begun to take a toll on his sanity.  
"Don't worry, we can handle this rationally," said Harry.  
"You said that before and it didn't do any good then either," said Sally. "It's just a cow, for heaven's sake. We walk around it, right?"  
We did so and continued on our way, but after some time it became apparent that the cow was following us. Every so often it made strange noises, which sounded unnatural somehow, not the sort of noises a cow ought to make.  
"Aw, come on. What's the deal here – are we that exciting?"  
"You know," said Harry, "maybe you could take off that hat that isn't yours and clue us in on what it wants."  
"No, thanks, I've listened to enough crazy for one day. Someone else can puzzle it out."  
"Besides," said Spike, "if you did that the cow wouldn't be a plot hook any more. We have to drag out the suspense."  
"Shut up."  
"Maybe it's someone who disguised themselves as a cow with Polyjuice," I said.  
"Of course not," said Harry. "Polyjuice doesn't work right for disguising yourself as an animal – Hermione found that out when she accidentally used a cat hair instead of one from Millicent Bulstrode."  
"I forgot about that."  
"You couldn't have known about it at all. You were dead at the time."  
"No, I wasn't."  
We argued for some time over whether or not I was dead, and at length we emerged from the forest into a room whose walls glowed with a faint pink light. I noticed a light switch on the wall and turned it on, activating a harsh green floor fixture that resembled the way the sky had looked earlier. The wall to our left had a picture of a toilet roll with an eye, horns and tentacles, and it wiggled ominously.

The cow had followed us in. It then proceeded to turn into a Wookiee.

"So it was a Wookiee that used Polyjuice to disguise itself as a cow," I said. "Maybe it works better for them."  
"Wookiees are fictional," said Harry. "They only happen in Star Wars. There's no such thing."  
"But there's one right there!"  
"I suspected we lived in Star Wars," said Spike. "I guess this is proof of it."  
"I sure hope you're wrong," said Harry. "I don't even like Star Wars. It's a bunch of capitalist pigs extolling the virtues of selfishness."  
"No, that was Atlas Shrugged."  
"In Soviet Russia, you shrug Atlas!" added Mouse.  
"You talk?!" exclaimed Harry. "There's no such thing as a talking cat."  
"There is too. Obviously."  
"No, no, this must be some kind of collective hallucination. The same goes for the Wookiee. Or maybe it's a glitch in the Matrix."  
"We live in the Matrix now?" Spike was getting frustrated. "I only just figured out that we lived in Star Wars. Next thing I know we'll be in some other random fictional universe. I hope we don't end up in Twilight. I hate those guys."  
"Don't tempt fate," I said.  
"I find that rather offensive," said Mouse, still addressing Harry. "I'm very much real and I resent the implication that I can't communicate with stupid, dirty humans just because I'm a cat."  
"Are you sure you're not just an expression of my subconscious fears?"  
Mouse hissed.

Someone unzipped the Wookiee from the inside, revealing it to be a costume containing a person – namely, Hermione.  
"See, I told you it wasn't a real Wookiee," said Harry. "Hermione? What were you doing in there?"  
"It's all Ron's fault. Ever since he became a Death Eater he's been out to get me, and I kept foiling his plans so he came up with weirder and weirder ones in the hope he'd be able to spring them on me without me noticing. I think he wants revenge, but I don't know what I did to deserve this."  
"Since when is Ron a Death Eater?"  
"I don't know. He used to be all sweetness and light, and then one day he suddenly turned evil and accused me of a bunch of stuff I didn't do. Something about fish people from Innsmouth."  
"Father thought it would be funny to give him false memories," said Draco. "Then Mother kicked him out and made me wear this silly outfit. Ever since then I've been known as 'Draco in Leather Pants'. I can't stand it, but she says it builds character or some hogwash."  
"He thought it would be funny? I thought you needed a better reason than that."  
"Not if you don't tell anyone."

Sometime after that we ate dinner, which consisted of multicoloured rats smeared with foul-smelling jam-ish stuff sandwiched between slices of bread that had disgusting purple fuzz on them. We didn't care because we hadn't eaten anything all day. It tasted like mildewed chicken.

Then we went to bed.

The next day, it turned out that we were actually inside Hogwarts and were supposed to be taking classes there. This was really weird: I was sure I remembered us graduating from the Fooblesmurf Academy for Ineffective Superheroes back in the 90's. (Well, all of "us" except for Draco, Mary-Sue and Hermione, who had only recently joined the party.) We were so useless that we graduated at the top of the class and always had the highest grades. Meg and Beanbag had transferred there from some other superhero academy that was for _effective_ superheroes, whose name I've forgotten; Harry and I were high school dropouts, Mouse showed up at the front door one day, Hewlett used to be the printer in the front office, and Sally... no one knew anything about Sally except that she was a failed experiment. She didn't talk about herself much.

So, then, why were we going to school _again_ , and to learn magic, no less? We each had one special power, and none of them were magical. They might be soft science, but even soft science prides itself on not being magic, even if that's what it is on close inspection.

One of the classes seemed to be an attempt to answer the question "how many wizards does it take to change a light bulb", but I don't remember what the other ones were about because the author was a lazy butt and couldn't decide which year we were in. Anyway, we discovered that while I, Harry, Draco, Mary-Sue and Hermione could use magic spells, Spike, Meg, Beanbag, Sally, Mouse and Hewlett couldn't. In the case of the latter two, however, it was probably because they didn't have hands to hold a wand with.

"No fair," said Spike after trying for the umpteenth time to Transfigure part of an eraser. "How come Mary-Sue is the only original character who can do this magic stuff? Even I can't and my alter ego is a witch."  
"I used the power of snakes," said Mary-Sue.  
"Everyone knows partial Transfiguration doesn't work except when I do it," said Harry.  
By this point I was really hyper-confused. I'd always thought my special power was to be an idiot, but now I seemed to have two of them and the other one wasn't even unique. It was like the world got turned upside down.  
"Maybe you need to believe in Jesus harder," I said unhelpfully.  
Spike didn't take kindly to my suggestion. "Oh no you don't. No way am I getting pulled into a Chick tract. I'd rather be stuck in that room with Lyta and Sheridan listening to them trying to one-up each other."  
"Is that from Twilight?"  
"Never mind."

Later that day we went to the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom only to find out that that class had been cancelled until they could find a new teacher. Beanbag was disappointed.

By the next day, however, class was apparently in session, and we sat for a few minutes wondering who the teacher was going to be. Mary-Sue was conspicuously absent. Then she walked in, her eyes the colour of holographic stickers, laughing her evil laugh.  
"What on earth is so funny?" I demanded. "Is it a private in-joke or are you willing to share?"  
She took up a position at the front of the room. For some reason there was one of those Muggle smart boards instead of something that made sense in the setting. "Sure I'll share, but the joke's on you. I'm your new teacher."  
There was a shocked silence: this was not welcome news.  
"What?!" yelled Harry. "But you're our age, and you just started to learn about magic, like, yesterday."  
"In case you haven't noticed, I'm so intensely awesome I can learn things in no time flat _and_ learn enough of them to accomplish whatever the plot requires. Now if you don't praise my holy satanic awesomeness, I'm going to punish you by talking about it nonstop until you beg for mercy."  
"Aren't you going to do that anyway?"  
"Of course. The idea is that if you listen to me long enough some of my awesome will rub off on you."  
"That's pseudoscience."  
"And everything else we've encountered _isn't_? Let's face it, Harry, you're in a fantasy universe with an incoherent plot that's constantly getting derailed by general craziness and awesome people like me whose job it is to derail the plot and anything else we can get our hands on. Except there's supposed to be only one of me at a time. Fooey."  
"Oh. So what's the lesson plan for today?"  
"I'd have gotten to that if you'd have only shut up instead of questioning my authority."  
"You're the one who kept talking about how awesome you are. How about _you_ shut up first?"  
"No, _you_ shut up!"  
The entire rest of the class consisted of Harry and Mary-Sue telling each other to shut up. Well, except for the bit at the end where someone asked her how she was supposed to be addressed, because "Professor Mary-Sue" just wouldn't do and for whatever reason we still hadn't learned her real name. Oddly enough she felt compelled to give her entire real name, which was Marybelle Sudorifica Velveeta Applepie Vanillakins Dystaxia Astasia Ten Bumblebees Sleeping on the Porch in the Land of Eternal Stupid and Perpetual Insanity. She said that Professor Mary-Sue was just fine because she didn't have a proper surname, and she had such a horrible long name because her parents were awful sadistic monsters which wasn't helped by one of them being Satan. She would have given us a long lecture on that, but class was over by then so she continued it the next day.

The next few DADA classes were just as bad. Mary-Sue seemed to be completely convinced she was a great teacher, but she never taught us anything. If she wasn't arguing with a student over something utterly inane, she was talking about how awesomely wonderfully nifty-keen and splendidly marvellous she was, or about her dark and troubled past ("They tied me up and tickled me with feathers!"), and on the rare occasions that she got to the material she intended to teach, it was all about how vampires are sparkly and werewolves look like football players.

"You're worse than Umbridge," Harry commented after one particularly dry lecture on whether Edward or Jacob would win at badminton and who would make more awesome thunder noises. "She didn't have us fighting each other, but she at least taught us some theory. Twilight characters playing badminton has nothing whatsoever to do with dealing with Voldemort and his minions."  
"Are you sure?" she replied. "You never know what information might come in handy."  
"I really, really don't think it works that way. Your lectures have nothing to do with anything remotely useful, and they don't contain information, besides."  
"I think you need to learn a little about what 'information' means." She then proceeded to define the word as "anything Mary-Sue says" in excruciating detail, and that was the end of that.

After about a few months of this, she got fired for dumping Transfigured noodles down someone's shirt (she'd changed them into mice). It was, of course, of great importance that said someone was wearing a shirt, because only Muggles wear shirts, natch. She also got expelled for either that or something else involving noodles, so we never had to deal with her again. Unfortunately, we now had to worry about what kind of awful replacement would be found.


	6. In which the teacher is replaced again

This chapter begins the descent into seriousness and angst. There's not too much of it and I kept it somewhat light and nonsensical, but it kind of loses the earlier tone. I was trying (and failing, naturally) to tie the thing into something that made sense on the surface – not a purposeful decision, as the main objective was to slap some kind of ending on it, and I'm more accustomed to writing stuff that's so dark you can hardly see the plot.

* * *

As it happened, the next teacher was Ron Weasley. This wasn't a much better plan. Once, or so I was told, this was because Ron was kind of a klutz and tended to do things like get his wand broken and then have his spells backfire, but now it was because he was evil.

On noticing Hermione among the students, he exclaimed: "What are you doing here? You're supposed to be dead!"  
"Says who?"  
"Says me, just now. Weren't you listening?"  
"No. It might have worked better if you'd just used Avada Kedavra or something instead of that silly Matryoshka costume."  
"But that's one of those unforgivable thingamabobbits."  
"You're not very good at being evil, are you. I told you, you should give up on this whole Death Eater thing and go back to being friends with me."  
"I'm _not_ evil. Well, I am evil, but it's for a good cause, so it's not really evil, you know? Okay, maybe it's for an evil cause, but the principle still stands."  
"What principle?"  
"The one about how you shouldn't recruit a gang of Innsmouth fish people in order to feed my siblings to Cthulhu."  
"I didn't do that. How many times do I have to tell you I didn't do that? Cthulhu doesn't even exist, and neither does Innsmouth. Arthur locked them in his mad science lab and they never came out again. I had nothing to do with it."  
"He'd never do something like that, and he doesn't have a mad science lab. He just tinkers with Muggle technology. I remember watching you order the fish folks around and that – how many times do _I_ have to tell _you_ I know it's your fault?"  
"No, Ron. I saved you from the experiments, and I tried to save the rest of them too but I tripped over a can of snake oil and the place caught fire. Don't you remember?"  
"That's just what the conspiracy wants me to believe."

The argument between Ron and Hermione took up the rest of the class and devolved into them trying to cast random spells on each other and lock each other in the closet. Ron seemed to be more concerned with being evil than teaching a class. Draco interjected once or twice that Ron had been given false memories, but the latter insisted that Draco was also part of the conspiracy because that's just what one of them would say.

As with Mary-Sue, this was an omen of things to come. Ron would spend the class telling Hermione she was evil and he needed to avenge his siblings, and she would insist that it wasn't her fault, it was an accident, and it was ultimately Arthur Weasley's fault for doing those weird experiments of his. She never explained what the experiments were all about, though; she didn't seem to know. All she knew, she explained to us one day over lunch, was that there was all kinds of weird stuff in there – cans of snake oil, jars of cat hair, assorted containers with evil-looking contents, dead rats, beakers of colourful stuff, inexplicable gadgets, and a tub of strawberry ice cream. It looked as if it had originally been neat and tidy but its increasingly nutty owner had forgotten how to keep it so, and its contents were now strewn around willy-nilly, inviting accidents. Draco's tale of false memories enraged her: wasn't the false memory charm only supposed to be used for an actual reason? wasn't the justice system any good?

During the same conversation, Sally, who had been silently arranging her food so that it looked like Cthulhu, suddenly broke in with: "Arthur's mad science lab... I remember that place."  
Hermione was intrigued. "You do? Did he lock you up in there too?"  
"Maybe. I guess. I know they did something to me there, and I was a failed experiment, but it's a blank. Like part of my memory is missing. I don't even know how long the gap is. Weeks? Months? Ugh."  
"Sounds like you were Obliviated afterward," said Draco. "He could have done a better job, though."  
"Obliv-huh?"  
"You don't know what that is, and you've been at Hogwarts for how long now... I have no idea, actually. Time's been really squishy the last few years."  
"Don't be like that," said Hermione. "He means your memory was wiped."  
"Oh."  
"So what do you mean you were a failed experiment?"  
"I was taking a walk with my sister, then there's this blank, then I had this constant noise in my head and it was supposed to be other people's thoughts except it was garbled. Well, it wasn't actually noise any more than it was bright lights or anything, but there's no word for it. It was bloody annoying and it didn't work the way he was trying to make it work, so he gave me a tin foil hat to wear, which was real nice of him but I kept losing the thing for some reason after he turned me loose."  
"Okay... what? He was trying to make you able to hear everyone's thoughts all the time? That's impossible. No wonder it didn't work."  
"I know it's impossible, but about a year ago it started working properly for some reason, and suddenly there were all these voices shouting in my head and I couldn't stand it. It was worse than the noise. I'd lost my hat for good by then."  
"What's that on your head?"  
"Not mine. I met this woman who also heard thought-voices and she wore it to keep them out. She was going to arrest me because I needed authorisation to read minds because it was pseudoscience, so she took it off to find out if I was telling the truth, and she was totally nuts. Her head was full of glowy snakes and giant bloodsucking mice. Except then she forgot about arresting me because she couldn't decide if she was working for the physics police or the thought police, and she ran off without her hat, so I took it."  
Hermione sat there looking puzzled and mushing up her food.  
"You know," she said at length, "this sounds like the sort of impossible thing Harry would try to do. He's a good person, but there's a side of him that's willing to do anything to satisfy his curiosity about how the world works. And I mean _anything_."  
"I'm right here, and I had nothing to do with it," said Harry. "I agree that it's impossible and I think she made it up. Especially since she claimed we were all thinking about women in bikinis."  
"We were, though," I said. "Maybe someone cast a spell on us to make us think about that."  
"No, there's no such spell, and if there were it would be a stupid one."  
"It's good for distracting folks. Could have been to keep us from finding out about the unicorn and Quirrell, since it was part of the conspiracy and so on."  
The rest of lunch was spent discussing whether or not there was a spell for making people think about women in bikinis, whether it had been cast on us, whether we were really all thinking about that, and whether Sally was making it all up. We didn't conclude anything except that Scotch tape sandwiches don't taste good even when you're really hungry.

The next day I realised that the non-magical members of the Subheroes were only taking the classes that didn't involve using magic, like history, lightbulbs, and Defence Against the Dark Arts: they'd been kicked out of the other ones, and they weren't even supposed to be Hogwarts students at all but no one was paying enough attention to get them properly expelled. Why there was a class in changing lightbulbs was beyond me – the wizarding world didn't use that kind of stuff, and Hogwarts was lit with torches and things. We suspected it was there as some kind of joke.

It was taught by Professor Luminal, who seemed to be neither a man nor a woman and always wore strings of Christmas lights. It had gradually become apparent that it was actually about practical demonstrations of lightbulb jokes in general, hence the lack of magic. We were supposed to act out scenarios based on the question "How many X does it take to change a lightbulb?" where X was a group one or more of the students was part of. Some of them were amusing, but others were weird and others still were offensive.


	7. In which I awaken

One day Hermione was missing from all her classes, and nobody seemed to care except the dust bunnies who whistled sad songs about star-crossed Kleenex boxes. During Defence Against the Dark Arts Ron kindly volunteered that he was responsible for this latest disappearance and that no one would ever find out because his plan was so evil and air-tight; he seemed to think that we'd all mind our own business if he sprinkled his villainous monologue with a sufficient amount of evil laughter. I realised for the first time that his eyes were red and he had Spock ears.

Harry and Draco decided to be all heroic and head off into the Forbidden Forest to look for Hermione. No one else wanted to come along, as technically we weren't even allowed in there and we had to do homework involving tons of light bulbs. They did tell us how it went, though. The trees were made of pink sparkly tissue paper and seemed to stare into their souls with glowing ruby eyes of doom. They nearly got stampeded by a herd of painfully bright rainbow unicorns, and in the heat of the moment, thoroughly disturbed by the disturbing event, they found themselves kissing each other with the passion of a thousand dire dust bunnies. At least, that's what Harry said, but Draco denied it and said he only liked girls. Then a unicorn of pure darkness rode by with Hermione on its back, and she said she didn't want to be saved from being the damsel in distress unless her rescuers actually had some romantic interest in her, because otherwise the cliché wouldn't be accurate.

During the next DADA class, Ron was furious that Hermione had once again been discovered, except he really shouldn't have been because the discoverers didn't do a very good job. I don't know how he knew about that because no one told him. He gave a long speech about how we would not get away with foiling his plans again because he was one of the good guys and the good guys always win, except he was actually evil, or something like that. Then he talked about how he was an unregistered Animagus and he was going to turn into his fearsome animal form, a cross between the two most terrifying dire beasts.

After a dramatic pause, he turned into an oversized Kleenex box stuffed with dust. I think he was supposed to be a cross between a dire Kleenex box and a dire dust bunny. In any case, that was the end of him.

The next teacher was yet another dramatic pause, as seemed to be the convention. Well, actually the next teacher was Mary-Sue. She wore a dress in a strangely ominous pattern of gold and purple, matching her eyes. The skirt was very short and I occasionally got glimpses of her underwear, which had pink bunnies on it.

"This is impossible," said Harry. "You were already affected by the curse on this position. How did you manage to come back? Is the universe out to get us?"  
Mary-Sue gave a smile that might have been sweet if it hadn't been for her apparently limited facial muscles; instead it was faint and slightly creepy. "Of course it's not out to get you, dear. It's out to give _me_ an advantage. I shouldn't have been affected by the curse at all, but it seems _someone_ has been derailing my plot."  
A voice came from outside the door; a familiar voice, but one that now sounded somewhat more self-assured and sane. "And naturally she's standing right here."  
Tin Foil Woman stepped into the room. She was wearing a bikini, and she no longer had that wild, spacey look.  
"Well, if it isn't good old experiment #17-B. Couldn't you think of anything better to wear? You're in complete control of this situation, you know, and I know how you _hate_ it when folks imagine you in a bikini."  
"If I were in control I wouldn't be doing this in the first place. And that's not my name. Neither is 'the telepath', nor 'the Matrix', for that matter."  
"Fine, be that way. Those things are all you'll ever be. There's nowhere for you to go."  
"You just want me to think that because you're afraid of me. You're more afraid of me than I am of you, and you know that. You also can't see past the end of your nose. You thought it was for a good cause in the beginning, but you were wrong even then. I've had enough. I wasn't touched by Vorlons, Cthulhu isn't my father, and I don't work for the physics police. You can't keep fooling me, especially not since you thought of my name. My _real_ name. My name is Tamara Jones... and I will be free!"  
The last sentence seemed not to have been said out loud.

Weird green stuff ran down the walls. The chairs and desks turned into abominable hybrids of trees, unicorns and toilet rolls, and maybe a few chainsaws and random other bits of Muggle technology thrown in for good measure, and they fused with the other people in the room; and it all shone brightly and danced in a manner that might have been pleasing to starfish aliens. I somehow had the impression that someone was fishing around in my head with astral tentacles and that the contents thereof mostly didn't belong to me.

In the midst of this indecipherable scene, I remembered.

There was no such thing as the "Subheroes", nor the Fooblesmurf Academy, or at the very least I had never participated in either one. I wasn't unique. My special power wasn't idiocy; the only special thing about me was that I was a witch born into a family of Muggles. I remembered Petunia's jealousy, how I wished I could have shown her that it wasn't my fault, but I'd given up and told myself she wasn't worth worrying about. I knew now that I'd already been to Hogwarts and graduated – how many years ago was it? I'd lost track of time. I also hadn't been Lily Evans in a good many years. No, I'd married James Potter, believing I could change him from his immature ways and his messy hair. He had indeed been a good husband for the short time we were together, though his hair seemed to have a mind of its own. Then when our son Harry was one year old – yes, he _was_ my son – Voldemort had come for him. He killed both James and myself. I begged him to take me instead of Harry, but he did say he was here for Harry and was going to kill him anyhow, so perhaps I should have known better...

No, that couldn't be how it happened. I was alive now.

I was standing there trying to sacrifice myself, and Mary-Sue showed up seemingly out of nowhere and cast the Killing Curse on Voldemort, and that was it for him. Why was I so sure it was her? She looked so different in my memory. She had normal hair with no snakes or purple streaks, and it wasn't as black or as long. Her face was average, though not quite plain. Her eyes were a plain brown, no hint of outlandish or changeable colours. Finally, she was wearing Muggle clothes, which were just as average as her face. I remembered wondering what the clothes were about.

She took a knife out of some pocket of hers and made a cut on her forehead shaped like a lightning bolt. I asked her what she was doing, but her only response was laughter; it had a faintly ominous undertone, hardly foreshadowing the evil cackling that had become more familiar to me. I barely had time to be disturbed by this before she seemed to vanish into nowhere, just as she had come. I couldn't tell if she was using magic to do that or not. She looked too young to be Apparating.

While I was distressed by James' death and confused by our mysterious young saviour, I still had Harry. He grew to look a lot like his father, with the messy hair and everything, except that he had my eyes. I didn't give much thought to Mary-Sue until Harry first went off to Hogwarts, when he learned that she was his long-lost sister who was best known for defeating Voldemort and being the only person to survive the Killing Curse. She was the "Girl-Who-Lived". For it could only be her, as the description he gave matched my memory, save that she was now somewhat more embellished: her hair was streaked with purple, she wore extravagant outfits, and her eyes were flecked with green and gold; besides, I had seen said defeat. I also learned that she had been sorted into Slytherin and that many were horrified at this development, as Slytherin was the evil house.

Her name was Alexandra Potter, apparently, or "Alex" for short. Only recently had I come to know her as Mary-Sue. She often volunteered that her middle name was Lily, after me. Why after me?

I was bewildered by the obvious inaccuracy of these statements. I would have known if I'd had another child, particularly one who looked to already be fifteen when Harry was one. I would have been a very young mother in that case. Furthermore, she hadn't survived the Killing Curse, she'd _used_ it; but her scar, which she had put there herself, was given as evidence of the claim. I knew that wizards could only be scarred by black magic, so I found it puzzling that a seemingly ordinary knife had done that. Maybe she'd put a spell on it. Yet no matter what I thought of, I couldn't make sense of it all, never mind that she was fifteen when I first saw her and ten years later she was the same age.

I might point out that I was only so sure Harry's description of Alex's appearance was a reasonable match for my memory because he described her in such lavish detail. Most of his comments centred on how incredibly beautiful she was, but it was enough. It worried me how much he talked about her, especially since he believed she was his sister in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I hadn't talked to Harry about what really happened that night, fearing it would disturb him too much, but now that Alex had reappeared I felt compelled to tell him what I knew. At first he believed me, though he was as confused as I by the discrepancy between what I had seen and what everyone else seemed to believe. However, one day he sent me a letter saying that I was a despicable liar who made up my version of the story because I was jealous of Alex's fame and success (she was very talented for some reason), and I would be very sorry for spreading such vile rumours. I didn't know what to make of it. I thought I'd done a good job of raising him and showing him he could trust me; where had I gone wrong? Should I have told him what I knew earlier? It did not occur to me that Alex might be entirely to blame: it is the curse of a good parent to always blame oneself for the failings of one's child.

Harry's threat might have been vague, but it was not empty. How odd to think that he was still a first year. One night in March 1992 – I can't recall the day – Alex broke into my house and dragged me off to the Weasleys' place. There was an exchange of spells beforehand which must have left me unconscious because I don't remember how I got there. I was surprised to learn that Arthur Weasley's experiments were not limited to technology but involved humans and other animals, or so I inferred from the existence of his laboratory or "mad science lab", which I hesitate to describe here. Arthur wasn't around – I assumed he was in bed. Snape was there because he'd borrowed the lab or something. He introduced me to Tamara, though only as 17-B, who had some kind of special abilities due to experiments he'd done on her; he explained this with a bunch of weird technical terms that I didn't know, and he was going to have her do something equally incomprehensible to me because he wanted to get revenge on me for rejecting him. I seem to recall asking if a telepath was like a telephone, to which Tamara replied that yes, it was, but with more bananas. And don't forget bananas and bark, and from there on off to a long speech about elephants made out of shoes and then nothing in particular, interrupted partway through by a hysterical laughing fit. Even in the low light I saw that she looked about seventeen, and I wondered how I could ever have loved someone who would drive one so young so utterly mad that she believed she was a telephone made from bananas. I also noticed that Snape looked more than ever like he needed a bath. Back at Hogwarts he might have looked like an unhealthy plant, but now there was something downright menacing about his long greasy hair, as if it were about to jump off his head and attack me.

Then I noticed the way he and Alex looked at and spoke to each other, and I remembered Harry gushing about how she was his favourite student, how his cold, strict demeanour was completely absent around her and he even became more attractive; and I no longer understood why he would feel anything for me either.

"Wait, what? But if you're in love with Alex, what do you want with me?"  
"It was my idea," she said. "I got him to tell me all about his past and how bitter he was about how you and James treated him. He didn't want revenge at first, but _I_ did because everyone who was ever mean to Sevvykins" – her nickname made me cringe – "deserves to have something bad happen to them. Admittedly he'd probably hate you less if you'd died like you were supposed to."  
"I was _supposed_ to die? Then what'd you go and save my life for? Just... what?!"  
"The point wasn't to save your life." But there was a faint uncertainty in her tone, and before she spoke she paused an instant too long with an unreadable expression.

Shortly after that was the end of my life in the real world. As in many dreams, I had no memory of reality – all I knew was that I was in a world that seemed not quite real and usually made sense but as time passed grew more and more bafflingly incoherent. My inability to understand what was happening with my surroundings convinced me that I was stupid, and as the history of this world was revised from time to time without my being aware of it, this was turned into my special power and I became part of a band of "subheroes" who each had one useless power. The others were not present in the beginning.

Now I knew that what I had experienced from then till now was just as unreal as it had seemed, a mere dream that had the audacity to be too vivid and take too much time, as it was forced on me. My memories had returned to me because I was waking up.


	8. In which reality is revealed

I was lying on the floor of a dimly lit room that smelled stale, with hints of old socks and expired food. It took some effort to pull myself to a sitting position. It appeared to be some kind of basement, lit only by a few high, narrow windows, and unfinished, with plumbing on the ceiling and walls made of stone. The other Subheroes, as well as Draco, Ron, Hermione, Alex and Tamara, lay scattered around the room. Well, that is, except for Harry and Hewlett, who were nowhere to be seen. Alex was sprawled untidily near the door, as if she had fallen there.

Spike wasn't here either. I knew now that he would never be back, as he'd never existed to begin with. I wasn't even sure now if he was _my_ alter ego or something Tamara had put there.

Everyone was wearing some kind of generic white outfits and their hair was cut to a few inches long. (That is, except for Alex, who had long hair – now restored to its original uniform state – and one of her obscenely fancy dresses.) Running a hand over my head revealed that my hair was in the same condition. I wished they hadn't done that, as I'd once taken pride in it, but the wish was dull and distant: it seemed like centuries ago that my appearance had been on the list of things to worry about. How long had I been here, anyway? What year was it?

"2002," said Tamara, who was staring blankly at the ceiling. "Ten years."  
Time passed more quickly for adults, but ten years still seemed like a long time. It _was_ a long time. My hair was probably turning grey by now. Wait, how did she do that? She wasn't even looking at me.  
"It doesn't work like Legilimency because it isn't. It's not something I _do_ , it just _is_."  
That was the most lucid explanation of her abilities she'd given so far, but it was still pretty cryptic to me. Before I got the chance to ask her what she meant and whether the nonsensical stuff in the "dream" was true after all, Alex joined the non-conversation. She was leaning against the doorframe and I could see now that her eyes were red.  
"Ugh, I feel awful. Come on, 17-B, I know you didn't –"  
"The name's Tammy. Call me _that_ one more time and I'll blow your head off like in Scanners. Well, I won't really blow your head off, but you'll wish I had."  
"Jeez, that's harsh. Besides, you've already mind-raped me, like, half a dozen times."  
"You deserved it."  
"You used to do that _for fun_... Tammy."  
"So? It's not my fault that with great power comes great insanity. And you totally did deserve it for turning me into a freak."  
"Sorry, you've lost your right to play that card. You did it to a lot more people than just me and most of them never did anything to you. Some of them died from it. Heck, _I_ never did anything to you. That was Severus."  
Tammy was sitting up by now, and she looked down at the floor somewhat dejectedly for a few seconds before replying. "It was your idea. The whole thing with giving special powers to Muggles, that was all your idea, even if you got him and Harry to help with it."  
I broke in. "Harry did _what_? That doesn't make sense. Nothing you say makes any sense."  
"Harry does impossible things," said Hermione. "Alex taught him all about how science works and together they would do all kinds of stuff no one could do before, like partial Transfiguration. They were such great students that everyone forgot about me. But they became more and more unethical, and –"  
"Be quiet," snapped Alex. "You're just jealous."  
"She's right, you know," said Tammy. "You didn't see us, or anyone, as real people because we were fictional. You thought we were just plot devices. But deep down you were afraid you were wrong, so you tried to dehumanise us by giving us numbers and making us forget our names. Well, guess what – those memories you were going to complain about me dumping in your head? Those filthy _fictional_ memories? They're just as real as you. I did that so you'd understand what you did. Doesn't seem to have made an impression."  
This was making less and less sense.  
"Would you knock it off, you stupid nutcase? I already knew what happened to those... those _characters_. I wrote the plot, for crying out loud."  
"No, you didn't. You became part of the plot. That's the whole point in self-insert fanfiction – you're not you any more, you're just as fictional as the other characters, especially when you give yourself abilities you didn't have before."  
"I am _not_ fictional. You are, so stop trying to make me feel bad about all this stuff that isn't real. I'm still in control of you and everyone else."  
Tammy laughed. "If you could control me I wouldn't have set us all loose from that silly illusion. I wouldn't even have been able to do mind control stuff in the first place, and I'd have been able to turn off the mind reading. And I wouldn't have been made out of bananas and bark. Don't forget to put tree legs in your electric torch sandwich, or the books will eat your face. What was I saying? Ah, yes – you're afraid of me because I'm better at derailing the plot than you. You only care about that thing I did to folks because it messed with the plot, so you have no right to –"  
"Stop it. You're _not_ real."  
"And you know what else? You have red eyes. That means you're evil, and you know how the bad guys always lose."  
"I don't believe you."  
"Would I lie to you?"  
"Well, yeah."  
"Fine, I'll try and wrangle a mirror from Bella and Edward. Stupid vampires hid all of them somewhere. I reckon it was Bella because I can't get a reading off either of them as to where it is. I can't believe that idiot managed to track me down and drag me back here." Tammy muttered something about how humiliating it was to be recaptured by someone who didn't even know what her own body was doing half the time, as well as something about how _Twilight_ vampires didn't play by _Harry Potter_ rules and this was just so _noncanonical_. I'd long since stopped trying to make sense of things.  
"No, you're not leaving this room. Speaking of the last time you escaped, you made a godawful mess. Or don't you remember?"  
"Beanbag, come here." Beanbag did so, and she whispered something in his ear.  
"What are you guys doing? You're not about to do what I think you're about to do, are you? I told you you can't do that, Beanbag. You'll end up in hyperspace!"  
"I can too," said Beanbag. "You tried to make me think my power didn't work right because you didn't want me using it. I know better now."  
With that, he and Tammy held each other's hands and disappeared into thin air.

After some time they returned with a partially smashed mirror, albeit one that still gave a passable reflection. Alex seemed to be afraid of it.

"Come on, look in the stupid mirror or I'll make you. I had to get Buffy to pop round and threaten the morons before they'd tell me where it was. Scared the daylights out of them, it did."  
Alex looked in the mirror. Her already pale face went even paler, and she cried out in shock.  
"Happy now?"  
"I... I _am_ evil. I always gave the evil characters red eyes, and now I'm... but why? Why did this happen to me? I had such good ideas. I just wanted to fix everything and make everyone happy." She looked like she was going to cry.  
"Still in denial, huh? You were trying to figure out how much you could bend the rules of the universe. You originally wanted to make things better by having Lily survive so Harry wouldn't end up with the Dursleys, but then you got all excited over how you circumvented the prophecy and you decided you'd see how much you could defile canon."  
Harry was going to end up with the Dursleys if I'd died? Yech. Those folks were unbelievable. How do you even get so fat you take up an entire side of the table?  
"Stop reading my mind."  
"I can't stop, and it's _your fault_. Didn't I say that already? You're just mad because you know I'm right. Besides, if you weren't fictional you could make me do anything you wanted. You know you can't."  
There was a long silence during which the two stared at each other. Finally Alex said: "You're right. About me, not about you."  
"Please don't do what you're about to do. It's not that bad."  
"Yes, it is. I screwed up the plot and played fast and loose with others' lives. I may not be able to undo what I've done, but I can at least undo my existence."  
"Alex, please, that won't solve anything."  
"Like you care." She took out her wand and pointed it at herself. "Avada Kedavra."  
There was a flash of green and Alex fell back down. It was an evil colour, but it had done her good: her eyes were once again brown, and there was a look of peace on her face as if she'd been released from eternal torment.

"I loved you, Alex," said Tammy, her voice breaking. "I wish redemption didn't have to equal death. Also, I'm pretty sure you just broke the rules again, silly."


End file.
